Terence Kemp McKenna : Psychonaut, Ethnobotanist ... Writer !

"It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must de-condition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy."

—Terence McKenna, "This World... and Its Double"

Terence McKenna is one of the pioneers in the research of plant entheogens and the mystical connections with consciousness which arise out of a psychedelic initiation ... the experience can then, well become repeatable with purposeful ingestion of a psychedelic sacrament to attain altered states of consciousness which the ancients have known since the time before our known recorded history originates ! A writer, philosopher, ethnobotanist, psychonaut, a new age shaman among the many titles McKenna earned as he set adrift on his psychedelic adventures this time around ... Terence McKenna and his eloquence on the matters of Extraterrestrials, UFOs and Psychedelics has enthralled and invoked millions all around this big blue planet, Terra ! ~(:-)~

Terence McKenna grew up in Paonia, Colorado. He was introduced to geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home. From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature. At age 16, McKenna moved to, and attended high school in, Los Altos, California. He lived with family friends because his parents in Colorado wished him to have the benefit of highly rated California public schools. He was introduced to psychedelics through The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and the Village Voice.

In 1975, Terence graduated from Berkeley with a degree in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism. Soon thereafter, he and Dennis published one of the earliest psilocybin mushroom growing guides under the pseudonames Oss and Oeric. Terence then spent some time doing large-scale farming of psilocybin mushrooms during the 1980s. Soon, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, lecturing extensively and conducting weekend workshops. Though somewhat associated with the New Age or human potential movement, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities, repeatedly stressing the importance of the primacy of felt experience as opposed to dogmatic ideologies. Timothy Leary once introduced him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet".

He soon became a fixture of popular counterculture, and his popularity continued to grow, culminating in the early to mid 1990's with the publication of several books such as True Hallucinations (which relates the tale of his 1971 experience at La Chorrera), Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival. He became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s, with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. His speeches were (and continue to be) sampled by many others such as Raja Ram, 1200 mics .... In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, which was documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes (his lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD).

Novelty Theory

One of McKenna's ideas is known as novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the Amazon at La Chorrera led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching. Novelty theory involves ontology, extropy, and eschatology.

The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or extropy (a term coined by Max More meaning the opposite of entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" or simply the "timewave" results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases.

Considered by some to represent a model of history's most important events, the universal algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a "singularity of novelty", and that he and his colleagues projected many hundreds of years into the future to find when this singularity (runaway "newness" or extropy) could occur. Millenarians give more credence to Novelty theory as a way to predict the future (especially regarding 2012) than McKenna himself. The graph of extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but it hit an asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012. In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. This is also the exact date on which the Mayan long calendar ends. It is believed by many that this day will bring great change to the planet Earth.

Terence McKenna left the physical form in the early hours on April 3rd 2000 at his home in Hawaii alongside his loved ones succumbing to brain cancer !

Commenting on the reality of his own death, McKenna said during the interview:

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights.... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears."